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Authors response to a comment in the discussion below the article: “I’m betting that Scott went to university straight after school and then went straight into

by jbc1 7y ago

Authors response to a comment in the discussion below the article: “I’m betting that Scott went to university straight after school and then went straight into medicine after that. He might have benefited from a year off experiencing promiscuity, drug use and even petty crime. It worked for me.” I think you’re joking, but in case not – between my junior year of college and the time I started medical school I took two years off and several different trips, during which I (for example) crossed Great Britain entirely on foot, travelled to about thirty different countries, hiked the Himalayas and got lost and had to be rescued by Sherpas, learned to scuba dive amidst poorly explored weird undersea ruins, starred in a Mongolian-language music video, taught elementary school English in Japan, got arrested twice and spent a night in a foreign jail, biked across Italy, and did various other ill-advised things. When I say there’s nothing wrong with taking some time off in your early twenties to be a bit crazy and see the world, I’m speaking from experience. I swear I wasn’t always as boring as I am now, and if I ever decide to write my own version of “On The Road” it will be at least as interesting as Kerouac’s – as it is, my old blog is about fifty times more worth reading than this place. But it doesn’t include any carjackings. My point isn’t that you shouldn’t explore, it’s that you should do it without being a jerk and without fetishizing exploration as the be-all-and-end-all of life.

keiferski 7y ago
I’m not sure what that answer is supposed to prove. Kerouac stood for things that made (and still make) the consumer bourgeois middle class tremble. The fact that the author lists his early-twenties experiences as some sort of “checklist before becoming a real adult©” illustrates exactly that he just doesn't get it - the Beats in general represent a sort of life that is alien to your average person today. It’s about a mindset and a different approach to life than the fundamentally consumeristic one that is taken for granted in 2019, where counterculture has more-or-less been entirely destroyed or co-opted by people selling stuff.
- silveroriole 7y ago
  Isn’t wrecking luxury cars for funsies and treating women like a sort of livestock that you can beat and leave to raise your kids really super-consumerist underneath the shock factor? There’ll always be more stuff and more women (and bonus, you can get other people to do the work to make the stuff!), just consume and destroy them, move onto another part of the country where there’s still more stuff, keep on doing it cause the abundance will never end... sounds exactly like the ‘consumerist’ global economy.
  - keiferski 7y ago
    I think analyzing Kerouac and his books as a series of actions is to somewhat miss the point, and to bring a contemporary consumeristic / experience-focused attitude to the work. He doesn't really do anything important. The insightful part is the mentality, the thought process, the philosophy. Kerouac was pretty big into religion (not organized religion, mind you) particularly Catholicism and Buddhism, and to describe his works as "bad people travel around nowhere for no reason and do bad things" is to completely misunderstand the context and purpose of them. Most of Kerouac's other works deal with this pretty extensively (see The Dharma Bums), but since the Slate Star Codex guy (and most middle-class technocratic people like him) often have a real aversion to anything that isn't strictly scientistic, they end up missing the forest for the trees. Finally, I should add that reading literature from the past and dismissing it because it doesn't fit your contemporary moral worldview is both deeply ignorant and just plain unfulfilling. You don't need to think Kerouac was a good person to think he had something important to say.
    - saiya-jin 7y ago
      Yeah but you might still disagree with what he is saying, for numerous reasons. Acting like an a-hole just for the sake of 'fuck it' mentality ain't something to admire for many, doesn't matter if 70 years ago or tomorrow. To wrap everybody who doesn't blindly admire his discussed actions as 'middle-class technocratic people' doesn't add much to the discussion apart from certain snobbishness of 'I am better than you are if you don't agree with me'. We did / are doing some pretty crazy shit in our lives that Kerouac never even dreamed about, we just don't need to be a-holes while doing it. A bit of respect goes much longer way.
      - keiferski 7y ago
        I'm not arguing that you should agree with Kerouac, but that the Slate Star Codex review is deeply misinformed in a way typical of people with a certain mindset.
        throwaway_tech 7y ago
- MrPatan 7y ago
  "On the road" is all about consuming. Consume alcohol on a bar. Consume music (literally dancing to other people's tune). Consume women (literally paying for them as well). Consume drugs. There's very little production at all on the book. "People talking shit fruitlessly on drugs to each other" is the closest it gets to it. Oh yeah sorry, there's the production of a few babies, treated mostly as nuisances to get rid of. If your counterculture consists of spending money on the hospitality sector and petty crime, well, good luck. I think it works pretty well as a warning, though. Maybe I'm just old?
  - dbspin 7y ago
    Have you somehow missed the fact that the reason we're discussing the beats at all is that they collectively produced some of the most influential works of 20th century literature? The point of the beat movement, if it's reducible to a single idea, was to escape the prison of an expected life - to be and to experience the possibilities inherent in the final gasp of [white imperialist patriarchal] freedom in colonial America, and then to create art that successfully articulated and perhaps even evangelised that experience. I don't think anyones denying the misogynistic, sociopathic elements of their behaviour (or indeed of artists throughout history from Carravagio to Cosby). To advocate for the importance of art as cartography of experience is radically different to suggesting the lifestyle of the artist should be one to emulate. Part of the seductiveness of art is as escapism, as confrontation with darkness, as elegiac vision. There is little space in our contemporary culture for exploring the contradictions inherent in our shadow selves - let alone how they are necessary for light to thrive. It's exactly this resonance: with irresponsibility, with self destruction, with the truth of the moment (irregardless of consequences) that makes the work of the beats still so seductive.
    - silveroriole 7y ago
      The problem is, who is likely to find On the Road an escapist, elegiac, seductive fantasy? Sure, it’s not the ‘sensible rationalist’ slatestarcodex guy, but it’s certainly not, say, most women (unless their greatest fantasy is very masochistic). IMO the people who will find it the most seductive are precisely the trembling bourgeoisie who, of course, harbour fantasies of grabbing everything they can, using it mercilessly, throwing off the shackles of marriage and shagging everyone they can, etc. Every boring mediocre middle class white dude has these fantasies. If it was transgressive then, it ain’t now. It’s the opposite.
- cafard 7y ago
  I do intend to read the book again, but probably the scroll version. My impression from the last partial read-through is that Kerouac, at least his narrator, wants to take everything de novo. Of course you're my greatest one-and-only-forever love, I'm sure of it. Yes, she was last month, but this time I'm sure. (Repeat ad lib.) I think you greatly overrate the trembling tendencies, or maybe the sincerity of the trembling among the consumer bourgeois middle class. I am about as bourgeois (well, petit-bourgeois, as a Marxist acquaintance once told me) middle class as you can get. I wear the flannel shirts, jeans, and work shoes, once the transgressive costume of the Beats, to Starbucks, and guess who surrounds me there? Middle class folk in flannel shirts, jeans, and work shoes. The revolution will not be televised? Sorry, it will be televised, but it will only look revolutionary.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by jbc1 7y ago

keiferski 7y ago

I’m not sure what that answer is supposed to prove. Kerouac stood for things that made (and still make) the consumer bourgeois middle class tremble. The fact that the author lists his early-twenties experiences as some sort of “checklist before becoming a real adult©” illustrates exactly that he just doesn't get it - the Beats in general represent a sort of life that is alien to your average person today. It’s about a mindset and a different approach to life than the fundamentally consumeristic one that is taken for granted in 2019, where counterculture has more-or-less been entirely destroyed or co-opted by people selling stuff.

silveroriole 7y ago
Isn’t wrecking luxury cars for funsies and treating women like a sort of livestock that you can beat and leave to raise your kids really super-consumerist underneath the shock factor? There’ll always be more stuff and more women (and bonus, you can get other people to do the work to make the stuff!), just consume and destroy them, move onto another part of the country where there’s still more stuff, keep on doing it cause the abundance will never end... sounds exactly like the ‘consumerist’ global economy.
- keiferski 7y ago
  I think analyzing Kerouac and his books as a series of actions is to somewhat miss the point, and to bring a contemporary consumeristic / experience-focused attitude to the work. He doesn't really do anything important. The insightful part is the mentality, the thought process, the philosophy. Kerouac was pretty big into religion (not organized religion, mind you) particularly Catholicism and Buddhism, and to describe his works as "bad people travel around nowhere for no reason and do bad things" is to completely misunderstand the context and purpose of them. Most of Kerouac's other works deal with this pretty extensively (see The Dharma Bums), but since the Slate Star Codex guy (and most middle-class technocratic people like him) often have a real aversion to anything that isn't strictly scientistic, they end up missing the forest for the trees. Finally, I should add that reading literature from the past and dismissing it because it doesn't fit your contemporary moral worldview is both deeply ignorant and just plain unfulfilling. You don't need to think Kerouac was a good person to think he had something important to say.
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    Yeah but you might still disagree with what he is saying, for numerous reasons. Acting like an a-hole just for the sake of 'fuck it' mentality ain't something to admire for many, doesn't matter if 70 years ago or tomorrow. To wrap everybody who doesn't blindly admire his discussed actions as 'middle-class technocratic people' doesn't add much to the discussion apart from certain snobbishness of 'I am better than you are if you don't agree with me'. We did / are doing some pretty crazy shit in our lives that Kerouac never even dreamed about, we just don't need to be a-holes while doing it. A bit of respect goes much longer way.
    - keiferski 7y ago
      I'm not arguing that you should agree with Kerouac, but that the Slate Star Codex review is deeply misinformed in a way typical of people with a certain mindset.
      - throwaway_tech 7y ago
MrPatan 7y ago
"On the road" is all about consuming. Consume alcohol on a bar. Consume music (literally dancing to other people's tune). Consume women (literally paying for them as well). Consume drugs. There's very little production at all on the book. "People talking shit fruitlessly on drugs to each other" is the closest it gets to it. Oh yeah sorry, there's the production of a few babies, treated mostly as nuisances to get rid of. If your counterculture consists of spending money on the hospitality sector and petty crime, well, good luck. I think it works pretty well as a warning, though. Maybe I'm just old?
- dbspin 7y ago
  Have you somehow missed the fact that the reason we're discussing the beats at all is that they collectively produced some of the most influential works of 20th century literature? The point of the beat movement, if it's reducible to a single idea, was to escape the prison of an expected life - to be and to experience the possibilities inherent in the final gasp of [white imperialist patriarchal] freedom in colonial America, and then to create art that successfully articulated and perhaps even evangelised that experience. I don't think anyones denying the misogynistic, sociopathic elements of their behaviour (or indeed of artists throughout history from Carravagio to Cosby). To advocate for the importance of art as cartography of experience is radically different to suggesting the lifestyle of the artist should be one to emulate. Part of the seductiveness of art is as escapism, as confrontation with darkness, as elegiac vision. There is little space in our contemporary culture for exploring the contradictions inherent in our shadow selves - let alone how they are necessary for light to thrive. It's exactly this resonance: with irresponsibility, with self destruction, with the truth of the moment (irregardless of consequences) that makes the work of the beats still so seductive.
  - silveroriole 7y ago
    The problem is, who is likely to find On the Road an escapist, elegiac, seductive fantasy? Sure, it’s not the ‘sensible rationalist’ slatestarcodex guy, but it’s certainly not, say, most women (unless their greatest fantasy is very masochistic). IMO the people who will find it the most seductive are precisely the trembling bourgeoisie who, of course, harbour fantasies of grabbing everything they can, using it mercilessly, throwing off the shackles of marriage and shagging everyone they can, etc. Every boring mediocre middle class white dude has these fantasies. If it was transgressive then, it ain’t now. It’s the opposite.
cafard 7y ago
I do intend to read the book again, but probably the scroll version. My impression from the last partial read-through is that Kerouac, at least his narrator, wants to take everything de novo. Of course you're my greatest one-and-only-forever love, I'm sure of it. Yes, she was last month, but this time I'm sure. (Repeat ad lib.) I think you greatly overrate the trembling tendencies, or maybe the sincerity of the trembling among the consumer bourgeois middle class. I am about as bourgeois (well, petit-bourgeois, as a Marxist acquaintance once told me) middle class as you can get. I wear the flannel shirts, jeans, and work shoes, once the transgressive costume of the Beats, to Starbucks, and guess who surrounds me there? Middle class folk in flannel shirts, jeans, and work shoes. The revolution will not be televised? Sorry, it will be televised, but it will only look revolutionary.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]